TroyBlade wrote:Isn't the first half of it, the design of the prison in the Tower of Latria. Except, FAR LESS COMPLICATED.

I don't remember much of the Tower of Latria, only that I used to farm souls there so I probably knew the place to the tee. In Demon's you had a recall spell that returned you to the main hub with all your souls, kinda like the recall bone in DS3, and I freely abused it to kill a lot of high soul yielding undead in latria and then back to base. I go so strong by doing that that I ended overlevelling a bunch of bosses after doing it for a while.

TroyBlade wrote:Maybe you did realise the thing but didn't register that it was a thing worth realising.

Ok, I did realise the thing then. It's just an annoying mechanic you can hardly avoid and that messes up with my skip the trash habits when I end up lost or learning the boss (at least here there is no boss ).

I let myself go... I bought the DLC last Friday. It's installed and waiting for me to go at it.
Btw... didn't the launch trailer straight out tell you how to start the DLC? I feel bad for watching it, if it does...

Don't feel bad though. You can't miss it. There is no puzzle to solve. Just go to the right place. They even give you dialog with the guy without you talking to him, just in case you were really used to the area and weren't paying attention and missed him.

The one single thing to be aware of, is that if you were in the right place in the first place, then he won't appear. You need to warp somewhere. Even reloading your game is not enough.

A lot of people don't like the DLC much. The complaints are mostly either the lore or the length. To me, the lore is fine in that it has a nice understandable story. Way more so than usual for Souls. It's just not particularly connected to the story we already have. So people hoping for answers to those things we never had answers for, are disappointed.

The length is an issue. It took me 8 hours to reach the final boss. That's someone who took 60 hours to beat the main game first time - so I'm slow.

Would I buy it again? I'd pay double.. I'd probably pay just for the final boss. It has issues that I'll talk about later but there is no word for it other than Epic.

I've been watching a couple of speed runners, and whilst I'd never be competitive even if I spent hours trying, it's great to be able to just sprint through a level to the boss without bothering to fight any trash at all. I did the first 5 bosses last night, having killed just a couple of enemies that are troublesome around doorways. The speed runners quit and reload to reset doorways because it's faster but I can't be arsed with that. Oh and a couple of crystal lizards. Probably didn't take me much more than 30 minutes. It was NG+ so I don't know for sure. The professionals do what I did in 20 minutes..

By the way, the reason I'd never be competitive is not just the crapness (I died to Deacons - the speed runners don't do that, obviously) it's the menu management. It's INSANE. Being able to swap equipment and items while playing the game in the background when you can't even see it.

There's also the fact that they use glitches, which I'm not comfortable with. It's fine for them, but glitchless speed runs don't seem to be a thing. The main one (since FROM patched the early game issues) is dropping distances that would kill you but quitting out just as your death scream starts. You re-start the game at the bottom of the drop. I think you might need Spook active at the time, since they all seem to use it.

In other news, I watched EnB do the DLC. Despite not really liking DS3 much, he loved the DLC and thinks the last boss is the best boss in all of Souls.

It was a blast. AWESOME game. Maybe not Bloodborne AWESOME, but AWESOME still. And yeah, Troy, you were right: bosses are easier than DS1 and BloodBorne, but that actually didn't make the game less fun for me. If anything, it made progress more steady and the game more fun. Also, the world is simpler to navigate than in DS1, which was borderline untolerable at times because of that, expecially before the DLC added more fast travel options to the game.

The ending was terrible. You should at least get a final movie if you play such a difficult game (and one that's supposed to be the end of a trilogy!) for 40 hours but no, they still think you're not worth it. Bah.

So, what I did in my playthrough? Let's recap:
1) I started as cleric, with a Str/Fth build in mind
2) First I concentrated on a pure strength build. I used a sword (it probably was a broadsword, but I forgot about it sorry) til I got the Butcher's Knife in Road of Sacrifices. Then it was Butcher's Knife for life.
3) As usual, I didn't prioritize much HP, but tried to get enough to barely survive attacks @ my level. I leveled up Str and End first (up to 20) then Vigor up to 20 and then pushed for Str up to 40.
4) I have leveled up DEX up to 14 (using the ring to level it up to 18) to wield Wolf Knight's Greatsword to help with the bosses that were weak to its effects. Not really sure this was worth it, but the sword was cool to wield so, who cares.
5) I have used my weapons up to a certain point as 1 hand + shield, because I had that "paladin knight" idea in my mind. And because I didn't get the fact that if you wielded it with 2 hands you had a special ability available.
6) Which was, at the giant boss. I got the sword to kill it (even without reading a guide!), then couldn't kill it cause I didn't know of the L2 special abilities . I think that was the first time I read a guide for a boss I was facing (I only used guides on equipment and gear so far).
7) I did use summons on this run, expecially on council like bosses. I still find the targeting system of Dark Souls terrible at handling multiple bosses at the same time, so that's more or less compensating the handicap from the awful camera handling. After building my char up to 40 Str, I wanted to get my faith going. I wanted to cast miracles, or at least do something that looked more "paladin-like". I think I was around 20 FTH when I downed the Dragonslayer Armor and got the Dragonslayer Greataxe. I immediately loved the look of it, and I already had used a big mace to farm before, so I ended up throwing away the idea of the miracle casting paladin in favour of the Greataxe handling paladin.
9) The final part of the game makes farming so easy that I got level up much faster (thanks Archives!). Ended up STR 40, FTH 35, END 25, VIG 25, VIT 9 (or 10, bye bye "knight in heavy armor" idea ), DEX 14, ATT 14, LCK 13 when I finally downed the Soul of Cinder IIRC. With a +5 Dragonslayer Greataxe that made a TON of damage to the poor Lightning weak final boss.
10) The idea of a big armoured knight was cool, but this installment of the series basically makes armor mostly useless. Or, better said: you need to have an armor piece equipped in each slot, and if you can tweak your resistances you can actually survive, say, 3 attacks instead of just 2, but there's no way to build a truly armoured tank like you could do in Dark Souls 1 or Demon's Souls. Rolling is king here, making this game more similar in design to Bloodborne than to DS1.
11) I did the run mostly without reading guides for levels or bosses, but I did went back to guides in the last part of the run to understand how to get Titanite Slabs, miracle books and things like that.
12) As I finally placed the embers on the thrones I went back to the witch seller to buy my Titanite Slab. I bought a Titanite Slab, 5 Titanite Scale and 8 Twinkling Titanite. Only to realise I just SOLD a Titanite Slab, 5 Titanite Scale and 8 Twinkling Titanite. Yes, I sold a Titanite Slab (the one I got from Crow). I think they should have made a DLC with a boss named after me, "Soul of Kelodur, Lord of Swearing" after that happened. It was brutal.
13) I wanted to get the big lightning spell with the covenant of the sun, but I have abandoned the idea after a while cause I was just waiting too much in between summons. I think I got like 9 or 10 medals in the end.
14) As far as the story goes,

Spoiler!

I got the girl that sold miracles to become a firelink maiden, got Greirat around for a while but then he went missing, and everyone else is probably dead. I gave my firelink maiden the eyes and it looked like a big thing, but it didn't actually look like it mattered in the end. Then I lit the first bonefire or whatever it was called. No idea what I've missed all over the game, TBH, I haven't even checked.

14) I still have to do the Nameless King fight. I haven't tried it yet, but I know people say it's the hardest fight of the game, so it looks like more fun is incoming.

All in all... AWESOME stuff. I'm tempted to go back to Bloodborne right now.

Yeah I'm definitely not whining about the bosses being too easy, it was just an observation really.

And I think I said it before but the completely confusing let you go anywhere at all approach to DS1 is only bad for your first playthrough when you have no idea where to go. After you know where everything leads, it makes the game much better. So much better. I'm definitely a fan of the less linear. But yes, on first playthrough it's a nightmare.

Having said that, the utter lack of linearity is one of the things that puts me off The Witcher. It's a little overwhelming when you have so many options.

I'm pretty sure the Butcher's knife has a damage penalty compared with similar speed/weight weapons, thanks to the tiny health gain or health leech or whatever it is. That doesn't make it bad I suppose, just that you could have been hitting stuff harder. I think.

Do you have the whole of Archdragon Peak still to do or just the Nameless King?

Also, the DLC is superb. Don't listen to the haters.

I didn't have any trouble getting summons for the Sun Bros. Even when over-levelled for a boss. In fact, it's probably better to be over-levelled, because you end up getting summoned for NG+ which gets you more souls and makes you even more over-levelled. My char who is working on the platinum was something like 140 when finished with Sun Bros and some other covenant farming.

There are quite a lot of NPC questlines you don't mention. I mean, obviously. Most of them would take years to discover without a guide. But worth following a guide if you play through again, I think.

TroyBlade wrote:And I think I said it before but the completely confusing let you go anywhere at all approach to DS1 is only bad for your first playthrough when you have no idea where to go. After you know where everything leads, it makes the game much better. So much better. I'm definitely a fan of the less linear. But yes, on first playthrough it's a nightmare.

I haven't done any second playthru in my Souls career so far, and you're probably right there, but the great thing of Dark Souls 3 was that I could actually go and finish the game without having to use guides, which I think would be almost impossible with Dark Souls 1. I even found almost all the levels without using guides, the biggest exception being the Smouldering Lake (that I did just after the Dragonslayer Armour cause I needed the Carthus Worm miracle).

TroyBlade wrote:I'm pretty sure the Butcher's knife has a damage penalty compared with similar speed/weight weapons, thanks to the tiny health gain or health leech or whatever it is. That doesn't make it bad I suppose, just that you could have been hitting stuff harder. I think.

Not really sure about having a penalty, but you can't buff it and you can't infuse it, so that's a penalty in itself. Still, it's the only weapon that had a A rating on STR (that become S on +10), so I went for it because I wanted something that scaled best with STR. And I needed 40 STR for the Dragonslayer Axe anyway. Well, if I had planned to use the Axe from the beginning, which I didn't. Oh, I also used Solaire sword alternated to the Dragonslayer Axe, it's great but having to double buff it on boss fights can be a pain.

TroyBlade wrote:Do you have the whole of Archdragon Peak still to do or just the Nameless King?

I've cleared most of the place. Killed the Wyvern (used a guide for it, I don't really get how people can infer how to kill it on the first place without having a place to read that tells them how to), and I've unlocked the Bonefire near the great bell, which from the warning signs around it should unlock the boss. Still killing stuff around this bonefire before ringing the bell though.

Troyblade wrote:Also, the DLC is superb. Don't listen to the haters.

I want to get it. But I'm still torn about getting just this DLC or the whole season pass. Will I actually play the DLC after it gets released next year? I don't think so. I got the Bloodborne DLC and never played that, in example.

Troyblade wrote:I didn't have any trouble getting summons for the Sun Bros.

At what time did you play? Maybe I was playing when people were not around.

I got the Bloodborne DLC and never played it. That doesn't make it a waste of money though.

Mostly I played late. Like you, I think. Sort of around 11pm to 1am on average.

And the bosses I did were mostly Champion Gundyr, the Twins and the Soul of Cinder. I did a few Dragonslayer Armour at the start but the hosts kept dying. Oh and The Dancer was similar but not quite as bad.

Well, I found several Dragonslayer Armour hosts, that was the more active one. I got summoned to Gundyr only once. And I did a couple of Aldrich.

Given the difficulty of the fight, I expect a lot of summons requests coming for Twins. How can you ensure that people survive that fight is beyond me, though. Still, I hadn't done it when I was trying to level up my covenant, so it's worth trying.

Boy, the more we talk about this the more I want to play Bloodborne again.